OpenBitTorrent launches, aims at Pirate Bay refugees

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Since the Pirate Bay announced that it was selling out, many in the Bittorrent community have predicted the death of the filesharing community.

Many others however, confidently predicted that the masses would just move to another tracker, as they did when Napster, Audiogalaxy and Limewire all took steps to legitimise their services.

As part of the Pirate Bay's moves to decentralise its services, it's planning to shut down its tracker, to be replaced by an unnamed third party tracker run externally. That tracker may well be OpenBitTorrent.

It already seems to have scraped the content of the Pirate Bay's index, which is used by several other sites, including Mininova. In addition, it's easy to add your own torrents to the tracker.

Removing them, however, is - the site says - impossible. It has a laundry list of reasons why, including that it can't see what file is what, can't track any IP addresses, doesn't keep any logs and the founders say they don't have any time.

The deliberate attempts to obfuscate any data that could identify individuals with their actions won't be terribly pleasing to the content companies, but are sure to go down well within the filesharing community. All the tracker now needs is support from indexing sites.